My love hate relationship with post.nl
There are times when I love the postal (in particular post.nl) service here in The Netherlands. The track and trace system is awesome, the app works mostly well and the service is on a whole pretty quick.
However, there are times that I find the customer service (that dreaded Dutch customer service) needs a whole new wardrobe.
Take this one time I bought a very large heavy item online. Now, I do not own a car, hence I wanted the delivery to my door that I paid for. I received the confirmation email and a track and trace code like usual. Awesome! Everything is going swimmingly.
What could possibly go wrong?
I waited in the house all day. The allotted time the post.nl app was telling me when I was expecting my parcel was delayed. I checked the app and it said, ‘delivery attempt failed, will try again tomorrow.’
You can imagine my reaction. I went to my front door and there wasn’t even a delivery note on the floor telling me that anyone even tried to deliver this parcel.
Deep breath.
Fine. I shall wait, again, tomorrow. And so I did, all day long. No one even attempted to deliver this package and yet again, the app was telling me, ‘second attempt to deliver failed, will try again tomorrow.’ What incompetence is this!? At this rate, I was pretty angry, but as per instruction, I waited again the next day.
Guess what?
‘The package couldn’t be delivered and is now at my local post office.’ I was fuming. I went to my laptop and did some investigation on the post.nl website I noticed that my house number was wrong. Oops! In my embarrassed shame, I went back through all my confirmation emails of my purchase to see if I did actually put down the wrong address. I did not. I put my correct address on all of the forms. This meant someone, somewhere had noted my address down wrong. This wasn’t my fault.
If you recall, this parcel of mine is big and heavy and I have no car, hence the online delivery. So my parcel sitting in my local post office was of no use to me. I contacted post.nl and explained the situation and said, considering that my address being wrong wasn’t actually my fault, you should deliver my parcel to my correct address. I provided evidence of my claim too and showed them that I put my correct address. I also explained the situation of having no car and why I needed this parcel to be delivered to my door. Their response, ‘We cannot deliver the package to you since we tried to deliver it three times.’
‘But you didn’t try to deliver it three times, you were at the wrong address, which isn’t my fault.’ I stated.
After a few exchanges and clearly, the customer service representative not helping me at all. I was told, ‘Go to the local post office, with this email as proof of who you are after 3 pm tomorrow to collect your parcel.’
So I did, with a help of a dear friend and two bicycles. I followed the instructions I was given and at precisely 3.01pm I entered my local post office.
My parcel.
I explained the situation to the worker and showed them the correspondence. All she said was, the person who post.nl was (desperately) trying to deliver my package to came in this morning and told us to send it back.
‘We sent it back already.’
So with that information, I went home.
I never got my parcel and I never got an apology.
Fortunately, these things are rare. But when they do happen, they <insert expletive> me off!
The next day, I accepted very large HD TV for my neighbor. Luckily I am an honest neighbour, hey.
What experiences have you had with the postal service?
